Even in my hobby I am applying model based design as a way to identify issues and to optimize for certain goals. There the way is the goal. Once you go through the learning curve of the tools and you update your math knowledge it becomes a powerful tool. As consultant and researching local (german) industry and universitiy activities I am surprized that Ford is going public to present the obvious! can it be true that such a mayor automotive player has not already well established and mature setup to apply this pretty well established technology and methodology. May be it is to get special conditions to aquire the licenses of mathworks! :)

But the model based design technology is really not limited to engineering as can be seen by browsing through the toolboxes offered by Mathworks. facinating I found the impact it will have on the job market! When you model the jobs and their tasks, combine the capabilities of model based design and modern control techniques and AI even jobs in the fiinance industry can be replaced by electronic systems being faster and more reliable and much, much cheaper! It is expected that I high percentage of all jobs can be replaced! The study I read is from the technical university of Munich!

What is ironic here is that the customer facing software, e.g. the info-entertainment interfaces are so bad. Ford went with Microsoft, which meant buggy, kluge interfaces and slow response. The customers expect any UI in a car to be as reliable and responsive as their iPhone. When it is as bad as GM or Ford, they buy another brand.

car makers are already into model based ECU design, even the smallest one are using Hardware In the Loop (HiL) prototyping for a few years. The bigger tier-one (like Bosch) wouldn't have developped ADAS without model based development.

From model based development, you get automatic code generation, today it's even certified code generation. With AUTOSAR you have a common base to share your development beetween different tier-one, different HW platforms and tools.

For a modern car manufacturer it looks like that now: the SW team develops the application as a model, they test it against the car model, generate the certifed code for an AUTOSAR platform and validate it with HiL. In parallel the HW team pick a nice AUTOSAR-enabled platform from a tier-one (or have it developped specifically for you if you're big enough). Port the generated code on this platform (connect the logical signals), validate the platform + generated code with HiL then again on the final car system an there you go.

thank you Junko...I don't blame them...car companies are supposed to design more complex things at the increased level of complexity while retaining very high reliability...just think what would people do if a car behave like windows PC?!? re-boot the engine? open and close the windows ;-)...so maybe at least one company decides to design cars without any of that info-entertainment features, they will have me as a customer, I really don't see a point of being entertained or checking my email when driving! Kris

@krisi, I had not thought about this until you brought it up. You are right. Maybe we do have too many car companies today.

As the urbanization progresses, we do know that people are losing interest in purchasing their own cars. It's high time for the automotive indsutry to rethink their business model, in my humble opinion.

That said, what was most interesting about this keynote speech at DAC was the fact that the automotive industry is finding the complexity of designing cars reaching to the point harder to manage. Carmakers do need to get up to speed with the model-based design process and they need to invest in it.

One way to accomodate this trend is lease. People anxious to have the latest features buy new cars and off-load them when they get bored. Other like me would be just fine driving 5-year old models. This exists today of course, maybe car makers can provide more fluidity to this process...And maybe car companies are producing too many models. Or maybe there are too many car companies around. There are only 2 big companies designing planes and similar observation applies to smart phones...Kris